That link for “well” should be this.
An extra “=” was stuck in there.
Seems like you are all saying different things.
Well, good luck to you all.
Time will tell.
Are you reading a different thread, perhaps? We all seem to be pretty much in agreement. And even if we weren’t, you should easily be able to debate each of us seperately.
If you don’t want to debate anymore, fine. But don’t try to make it look like there is some type of internal strife among those who disagree with you, which somehow makes arguing pointless.
Based on the fact that you have failed to provide positive evidence for your positions (creation being a theory, and the existance of things that we cannot measure), may I assume that such evidence does not exist?
…Seems like you’re still not answering me…
That’s a fair question. The answer is: I think the change happens gradually, but the realisation that it has happened is sudden. I actually applied the tactic (act as if…) before it was so clearly enunciated to me, but having gone through it I can hopefully give some insight into the process.
I was raised Catholic but stopped going to Church at the tender age of 12, and stayed away through high school, undergrad, and part of grad school. I was pretty firmly agnostic, didn’t really know or care what I believed—typical teenager, really. One summer, I went to church once, more or less for the heck of it. It was the first time in maybe ten years that I had gone by myself. (I had gone with the family in the interim, but that was different—I had to.) And that first time, it just felt so comfortable; my own reaction surprised me. But I kept going, despite not really having worked out what exactly I believed. Happily, Catholicism is… catholic… and doesn’t require certainty of faith in order to attend. (Clearly, there was Someone higher up who had sussed out this whole “act as if…” thing…)
Anyway, at the end of that summer I was sure I wanted to get confirmed. Did I believe in God? …yeah, basically. I made no secret about my beliefs to the priest. Learned a lot about the Church during the RCIA class that year, actually. At the Easter Vigil that year, I became a confirmed member of the Church.
I can’t really point to any time along the way where I suddenly started solidly believing in God. But at some point it happened.
So be honest about it. Go into a church and chat with a priest (maybe even make an appointment). Explain that you have been agnostic, but that you see the church and like the community, the comfort you see that people derive from their faith in God, the moral debate that people engage in, and even the opportunity to sing every week. Odds are pretty good that the church will be happy to have you. (Obviously, I can’t speak for every denomination, or even every priest within my own—shop around.)
If you are upfront with the priest about your doubts, you certainly can’t be accused of dishonesty. And if you are genuinely interested in these things, it is not dishonest to seek them. About all the priest is likely to demand of you is an open mind—like nearly anything else worth having, faith is something you need to work at.
My mom always says, never discuss religion or politics with friends. I should probably listen to her. But ignoring her makes my conversations so much more interesting.
As to what it would take for me to become convinced there’s a god, it’s really very simple. I’d have to meet him. Personally. No big - he poofs in, visits my basement, maybe we play some ping-pong or Crazy Taxi, he does the poofing trick again so that I can see he’s really doing it - and I’m a convert. That doesn’t mean I’d necessarily believe he’s completely omnipotent, or that he created the universe, or that he’s even supernatural or that his existence could not be analyzed scientifically. But if the sole object is “convince Mr. Excellent some really powerful deity exists”, then all I have to do is meet him. Simple.
And if I die, and there is an afterlife, that’ll work too. Provided it persists long enough for me to be convinced it isn’t just a hallucination.
Since I’d rather not die - how about popping in a saying “hi”, God?
No?
Oh well.
Where to begin, Svt4Him?
First, it is not possible for anyone to experience anything that they can know comes from God as opposed to from their own brain or body. When this fact is combined with the fact that ostensibly “divine” or “spiritual” experiences can be readily produced in the laboratory, drawing the conclusion from such experiences that some sort of “God” or other supernatural entity exists and is communicating with you personally is not only unjustified and foolish, it is rather conceited as well.
As we saw earlier, your belief in “God” preceded your interpretation of such naturalistic experiences as if they came from “God” rather than from your own brain. But I’ve experienced several very powerful “religious” experiences both as a Christian and later as an atheist! If such experiences were actually coming from a “God”, it could only mean that “God” wanted me to be an atheist!
Consider the fact that Mormons are taught to base their faith on receiving such “spiritual” experiences – a “burning in the bosom” – after praying for validation of the factual truth of the Book of Mormon, which is easily one of the most blatantly false, anti-scientific, and ahistorical books ever written. Intelligent, honest Mormons know perfectly well that the BoM is a book of fiction written/plagiarized by Joseph Smith to merely masquerade as history. (see, for example, Insider’s View of Mormon Origins, written by a respected and highly-placed educational leader of the LDS Church).
So, because a great many Mormons have powerful religious experiences which validate the absolute truth of an obvious falsehood, NO religious experiences should ever be believed to be genuine communications from “God”! Respect, – but never credit or believe – people who say things like: “This is prayer, and it is obviously real and functional. It does feel like speaking with another entity, doesn’t it? I am not separate from you. You are more than an individual you, though. This is an experience. You are having this experience. Do you understand that it is because others have done what you did and sought answers with such determination and intensity that there are religions to speak of it? The experience was described. And it does feel like getting answers back from another entity after posing questions to it, doesn’t it? But you did not ‘invent’ these answers. This is not ‘imagination’. This is not ‘merely in your head’. Merely? This is beyond who you are as a mere individual.” They’re sincere, but have unfortunately fallen victim to religious delusions fostered in large measure by their misguided beliefs and by their ignorance of what their purely materialistic brains have evolved to do quite naturally and without any contact with the divine.
Finally, a bit of advice to Mottpot: An earlier poster suggested that someone seeking faith should carefully read Scripture. That’s the LAST thing such a person should ever do! I was a deeply committed, born again, Bible-believing Christian attending a highly respected Protestant Bible college I chose because of my deep belief and my sincere desire to spread the Word when I started reading the Bible carefully, with guidance from my professors and other Christians on campus and in my church. It wasn’t long before I realized what a hideously EVIL “God” is portrayed in that festering book of hatred, fear-mongering, and wanton baby slaughtering! The truth about the vileness of the Bible and the “God” it portrays (the New Testament is scarcely better) forced me into a kind of Deism (though I didn’t know that then). But that didn’t last and, before long, my new-found critical faculties eventually led me to soft atheism and philosophical agnosticism (both views together represent, I feel, the most rational choice). To summarize, my careful reading of the Bible led me directly away from a belief in God!
You very much come across as both a good person and a good friend, Mottpot. As you say, there is no reason in the world to disassociate yourself from your friend just because you two do not share religious viewpoints! I, too, have good friends who are either devout traditional Christians, Jews, or Mormons. I value their friendship enormously, and we all actually enjoy arguing about our beliefs! Of course, out of mutual respect and friendship, we’ve long passed the stage where anyone tries to convert anyone else, even though I honestly believe that my religious friends are very sadly and deeply misguided in their choice to believe.
So accept your friend’s choice, but don’t get hoodwinked into sharing it! Remember, the Abrahamic “God” – Christian, Jewish, Muslim – is about as evil as evil can get. Demonstrate that you’re a healthier, more well-adjusted, more moral person by continuing to reject any belief in it.
This, of course, is nonsense, although I can easily see and respect how sincere you are.
NDE’s are normal physiological responses to certain abnormal physiological states. You need to read Susan Blackmore’s books: Beyond the Body: An investigation of out-of-the-body experiences, and Dying to Live: Science and the Near Death Experience. In the meantime, I suggest you read her short discussion of why, after many years of strong belief in psychic powers, she finally admitted to herself that it was pure bunk. It can be found at http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/NS2000.html
A good friend of mine had a powerfully evocative NDE as a result of a horrible auto accident. She had to be airlifted by helicopter to the hospital, and afterwards she told everyone – repeatedly – that her “spirit” hovered over and looked down at her seriously injured body, heard every word spoken by the pilots and paramedics (she also claimed to be able to read all their name tags), and noticed all kinds of specific details of the inside and outside of the helicopter, as well as all the usual stuff about a white light and a tunnel, straight out of the standard reports that Blackmore explains so well. She asked her Mom to bring a tape recorder so she could record her experiences in detail.
Being a true, open-minded skeptic who was certainly willing to believe her but also eager for at least some independent verification, I finally talked her into trying to validate that record. It turns out that she got NONE of the names correct. It turns out that she got NOTHING specific about the conversations correct (although they did talk about her injuries as she said, but that’s exactly what one would expect). She got NONE of the details of the interior and exterior of the helicopter right. In fact, she was wrong in every verifiable detail, even though she refused to accept that. She still insists that everything she recorded was exactly correct. I gave up challenging her, because she was far too much in love with her illusions. Her self-deceit brought her great comfort.
Sound familiar? No, I’m sure you’ll deny any similarity.
But here’s something for you to think carefully about: Psychics like Edward and Van Praagh smoothly ramble tritely about trivialities and never tell us anything significant about the afterlife! Are they in one of Mormonism’s three heavens? Are they in a Catholic or Pagan purgatory? Did they recieve their 72 virgins? Are they awaiting reincarnation? What??
No, the dead blather about where they left the insurance papers and suggest interior decoration advice such as straightening pictures!
NDE’s are purely physical, materialistic brain phenomena that in no way lead credibly to any belief in God or the afterlife. It’s merely a hallucinatory experience that people almost always misinterpret.
With respect, it would seem that perhaps you weren’t one of the more philosophically adept atheists, dragon.
What on Earth would bring you to imagine that anyone would bother to spend any time trying to discredit some obscure mystical crank’s book? Hell’s bells, man, the world has far more important things to concern us than debunking a book of unevidenced mystical assertions that very few people will ever read!
It’s truly a sucker’s game to try to provide explanations for phenomena for which there’s no good evidence to believe ever happened as described in the first place. Why should anyone bother trying?
To those who advocate trying, somehow, to get the atheist to experience the pure love of God in an overpowering, deeply personal epiphany which surely nobody could ignore, I offer my own story (a third of the way down the page).
Perhaps a somewhat rare beast, I am an atheist who has met God.
Sorry, that’s a little confusing:
I am an atheist who has met God and remained an atheist.
Evidence? Readers Digest? That respected bastion of peer-reviewed, scientific reporting?
Hilarious!
Sheesh! Brainwashed Korean POW’s?? Shades of Manchurian Candidate! Positive thinking works? Just like laughter is the best medicine?
Ha! This guy will believe absolutely anything, and the more ridiculous the claim, the more credulously he swallows it!
lekatt-- i am going to try a slightly different approach with you.
Yes. Time will tell. You are quite correct about this. In time, many if not all of these questions that our puny brains can imagine will be answered. But you say that you have the answers now. Can you demonstate the reasoning behind this? So far, you haven’t. But you are still correct. Time WILL tell. Until then, admit that you don’t know the answers. There may be life after death. But until we can measure, in any way, that this is happening we just don’t know-- until then it is merely faith. And faith is mere. Face it.
Leave it, man. A thousand years will tell. We just ain’t there yet.
Evolution! If normal brain chemistry provided a state of illusion/delusion, our species would never have survived!
No, NDE’s are a direct, perfectly naturalistic, response to perfectly naturalistic brain states. NDE’s have been repeatedly produced in the laboratory. See Persinger’s work, for example.
Furthermore, there are certain epileptics who have NDE’s almost every day and have come to know that they are not only perfectly natural and have absolutely NO divine or supernatural component, but that they’re terribly annoying as well! Your NDE led you to utterly unjustified, unscientific, and fallacious beliefs, in large part simply because their emotional components led you to prefer insufficient intellectual curiosity and critical reasoning skills.
Nice try, fella, but your sarcasm is completely unjustified.
Science, not being an actor, cannot “create” or “destroy” or “modify” anything, of course. However, it is a scientific fact that something can be – and always IS – created from nothing! Pairs of virtual particles are constantly coming into existence from nothing all throughout the Universe. Although the two virtual particles almost always meet back up with each other and thus mutually annihilate themselves, in certain circumstances some of these virtual particles become real and permanent. That, good sir, is creation ex nihilo!
Returning to your foolishly sarcastic remark, science does NOT need to operate as you so naively suggested! For just one minor example, do forensic scientists have to bring a dead person back to life in order to kill him again so as to “repeat the experiment” to be able to use circumstantial evidence (the very BEST kind of evidence) to determine how and when that person was killed? No? Then why should evolutionary scientists need to do so to establish the undeniable fact of evolution?
Science requires no such thing!
Thanks, slayer, for backing off. It’s one thing to describe how your brain works; it’s quite another to tell me how mine does, and the latter is pretty dang annoying to me, pretty nerve-hitting.
Now that I realize lekatt is arguing against evolution at the same time as he argues you can believe any damn thing you want to believe, I have a better sense of how seriously to take him.
MrO, what a horrible story! Again, it makes me think that some people really must choose their beliefs, however – especially within a given frame. Perhaps some people are intensely uncomfortable with saying, “I dunno.” When I don’t have enough information to draw a definite conclusion about something (say, the existence of God), I say, “I dunno.” Maybe other people feel the need or desire to have a definite answer, so they choose an answer and repeat it until they forget that they lack the evidence to draw a conclusion.
I don’t choose to believe that the folder on my desk with volunteer applications is brilliant orange. Rather, I can see it, and the evidences for its orangeness is so overwhelming that there’s only once conclusion I can draw. I perceive nothing about the folder that makes me think it is sentient, however, and so I can only conclude that it’s unlikely to be sentient.
I pay attention to the world, and I don’t perceive anything that seems to be evidence in favor of God’s existence. I don’t choose to believe God likely doesn’t exist; rather, given my understanding of the evidence around me, I am unable to find a reasonable interpretation of the evidence that leads to a belief in God’s existence.
Sure, if I said to myself over and over and over again, “God exists,” and maybe immersed myself in stories about God, and shunted away the part of my mind that analyzes the world looking for reason and patterns, then I might be able to force myself to forget that I had no evidence on which to build the belief that God exists. THat sounds to me like a delusion, however.
For me, a real belief is one that comes at the end of a process of gathering evidence and examining evidence: I look at the folder, perceive its color, and draw the only reasonable conclusion from that evidence. A false belief involves discarding evidence in favor of a predetermined belief, short-circuiting the evidence-examination process, and using brainwashing techniques (“affirmations,” if you prefer) to convince myeslf of something. This would lead to a false belief, and such a belief would collapse under analytical examination.
Daniel
The part were the OP keeps contradicting himself when it comes to the topic of “wanting to believe”. He will equivocably say (to all atheist objectors) that he does not want to necessarily believe but is open to all options.
He is what is called in a crisis of faith. He is seriously questioning what he believes in so far and he must explore all the possibilities including the existance of God. Something has made him call into question something he has believed in for a very long time. If the possibility of the existance of God is really that non-existant, then he wouldnt be questioning his non-belief of an imgainary entity.
reminds me of a line said by Jack Palance when he played Atilla the hun,
“I dont believe in GOD!!.. but i respect his lightning…”
Sure, I believe in life after death because I have seen it. I used to be an agnostic before my experience. It won’t take a thousand years for time to tell, maybe 20 or 30.
When Dr. Raymond Moody wrote his first book, over 30 years ago, until now much research has been done. This research has all pointed in the direction of life after death.
Studies of the brain do nothing to prove different.
That all brains are unique further support the life after death theme. Our brains are controlled by our spirit, so no two are alike.
I do thank you for your kindness.
Love
Leroy
He didn’t contradict himself, he just clarified what he was after. X-slayer, you seem to have some sort of delusion that the atheists in this thread are trying to steal Motpott’s soul. If your belief in God is that strong, surely it shouldn’t bother you so much for him to get the whole picture. You should chill out - this is a forum for reasoned discourse, not to induct people into your religion.